2008 National Book Award Finalist,
Fiction

Rachel Kushner

Telex from Cuba

CITATION

A profound and lush evocation
of 1950s’ Cuba, this debut novel is the first
to tell the story of the American executives who were
driven out by Castro. Though the chief observers are
two keen-eyed American children, Kushner masterfully
portrays the complex and varied forces of revolution
through the perspectives of dictators, workers, the
Havana underworld, the revolutionaries in the hills,
and the Americans in denial that their colonial paradise
is doomed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Kushner co-edits the
literary and art journal Soft Targets and is
a frequent contributor to Artforum. Her essays
and fiction have appeared in the New York Times,
the Believer, Fence, Grand Street,
and Bomb, where she is a contributing editor.
She has a BA from the University of California at Berkeley
and an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Los
Angeles with her husband and son. Telex from Cuba
is her first novel.

ABOUT
THE BOOK (from the publisher)

Young Everly Lederer and K.
C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the
Americans tend their own fiefdom -- three hundred thousand
acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround
their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's
dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes
for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around
them -- the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the
race hierarchies and violence.

In Havana, a thousand kilometers
and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret
dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La
Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask
his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in
the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl
Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane
plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat
full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly
begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony
humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched
by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers
of what is to come.

EXCERPT

There it was on the globe,
a dashed line of darker blue on the lighter blue Atlantic.
Words in faint italic script: Tropic of Cancer. The
adults told her to stop asking what it was, as if the
dull reply they gave would satisfy: “A latitude,
in this case twenty-three and a half degrees.”
She pictured daisy chains of seaweed stretching across
the water toward a distant horizon. On the globe were
different shades of blue wrapping around the continents
in layers. But how could there be geographical zones
in the sea, which belongs to no country? Divisions on
a surface that is indifferent to rain, to borders, that
can hold no object in place? She’d seen an old
globe that had one ocean wrapping the Earth, called
Ocean. In place of the North Pole was a region marked
“Heaven.” In place of the South Pole, “Hell.”

She selected the color
black from a list of topics and wrote her book report,
despite feeling that reducing Treasure Island to various
things colored black was unfaithful to the story, which
was not about black, but perhaps how boys need fathers,
and how sometimes children are more clever than adults
and not prone to the same vices. The Jolly Roger was
black, and there was Black Dog, who showed up mysteriously
at the Admiral Benbow, demanding rum. There were black
nights on the deserted island, creeping around in shadows
amid yet more blackness: the black of danger. Also,
the “black spots” that pirates handed out—a
sort of threat. A death sentence, really. “Who
tipped me the black spot?” asked Silver. This
death sentence, a stain of wood ash on a leaf of paper.
The leaf, torn from a Bible, which now had a hole cut
into Revelation. And holes are black as well.

She’d read about Sargasso,
a nomadic seaweed city, and hoped they would encounter
some. Other things floated on the ocean as well: jetsam,
which is what sailors toss overboard to lighten their
load, and flotsam, things caught and pushed out to sea,
such as coconuts, which rolled up on the shores of Europe
in a time before anyone knew what lay to the west. Maybe
coconuts still washed up, but they ­weren’t
eerie and enchanting now that you could buy one at the
store. In that earlier time, people displayed them as
exotic charms. Or cut them open. A strange white fluid
poured out, greasy and foul-smelling. Not poisonous,
just spoiled from such a long and difficult journey,
a fruit thousands of miles from its home under the green
fronds of a palm tree.

To get from green to red is
easy: they are twins. Thin membranes, like retinae,
attached at their backing. Her father saw red as green,
and green as red. A permanent condition, he assured
her. And there was a red grass native to the Antilles
from which you could make green dye.

Now picture red velvet drapes.

Part them.

Beyond is a room with perfect
acoustics. In it, a gleaming black piano. She can see
her face in its surface, like she’s leaning over
a shallow pan of water. She sits down to play—Chopin,
a prelude for saying good-byes, for dreaming in a minor
key.

Spin the globe slowly, once,
and return to where the dashed blue line skims above
the island of Cuba.